Social Work and Social Planning

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Browsing Social Work and Social Planning by Subject "Australia"

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    Australian lesbian, gay and/or transgender people and the law
    (Federation Press, 2014-02-11) Riggs, Damien Wayne; Due, Clemence
    Notionally the law is designed to protect people from harm or stigma (Posner 2002): it can of course do the opposite. While, as this chapter outlines, laws in Australia have increasingly become inclusive of lesbians, gay men and/or transgender people, this is only a relatively recent development in Australian law, and there is a much longer history of the law endorsing the marginalisation of these populations.1 For social workers, this means two things. Firstly, given the relationship between the law and social norms (where laws reflect social norms as much as they shape them), it is likely that historically many in the social work profession may have been complicit with the marginalisation of lesbians, gay men and/or transgender people. This might have been implicitly (i.e., by failing to challenge stereotypes or discrimination against lesbians, gay men and/or transgender people) or explicitly (i.e., by endorsing the marginalisation of lesbians, gay men and/or transgender people including in social work practice). Given the relatively slow and recent change in Australian laws related to lesbians, gay men and/or transgender people, it is possible that some social work practitioners continue to hold uninformed or discriminatory attitudes towards these populations, a fact that this chapter attempts to address through the provision of information about current laws and their impact upon these populations.
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    'The contented faces of a unique Australian family': privilege and vulnerability in news media reporting of offshore surrogacy arrangements
    (Taylor & Francis, 2014-09-03) Riggs, Damien Wayne; Due, Clemence
    In a paper recently published in Citizenship Studies (Riggs and Due 2013), we argued that media accounts of Australian citizens entering into offshore commercial surrogacy arrangements frequently evoke notions of the agentic reproductive citizen in order to represent medical or social infertility as a form of vulnerability that can be overcome through fertility travel. In that paper (and elsewhere, e.g., Riggs and Due 2010) we have also argued that media accounts of offshore commercial surrogacy undertaken by Australian citizens rely upon the depiction of women who act as surrogates as equally agentic in their decisions in regards to entering into surrogacy arrangements. Central to our argument in these previous papers has been the claim that if discussions about privilege remain at the periphery of media representations of offshore commercial surrogacy, then issues of vulnerability in relation to all parties will all too easily be discounted through a neoliberal narrative of agency. In addition, and following Millbank (2012), we would suggest that media commentary on issues such as surrogacy often shapes policy decisions, and thus it is important to examine how the news media in particular represents surrogacy. As such, in this commentary we extend our previous exploration of media coverage of offshore commercial surrogacy by examining a recent example of Australian news media reporting on the topic. Our aims in doing so are to examine how this example repeats the concerns raised above (thus suggesting something of a script evident in media reporting on the topic of offshore surrogacy), and to suggest some necessary changes to media reporting on offshore surrogacy that may help to engender a more holistic account of the topic.